Beating has since pre-biblical times been an accepted form of child discipline,
sanctioned by authorities. This makes it difficult for people to talk about the topic of
child beating. It is an issue surrounded by taboos, and there is a risk of talking bad
about one's own parents. Nobody truly wants to believe that their own parents would
deliberately want to hurt them. It is within this context that I have chosen to talk
about the sexual risks of spanking children. It is, as I mentioned, a topic surrounded
by taboos, but it is also sometimes a conscious choice made by the adults not to see
these risks. We are used to viewing children as asexual, despite the fact that Freud as
early as the 19th century pointed out that the child is by no means sexually
"slumbering." Freud was not the first to issue warnings concerning the sexual risks of
spanking children, or lower discipline as it used to be called, although perspectives
were a bit different then than they are today.

1.1 The Purpose of this Essay
The purpose of this essay is to try to shed some light on the part of child abuse
research that scholars usually choose to close their eyes to, for one reason or another.
The subject is by no means easy to chart, and there is always a risk of creating
scapegoats out of parents who spank their children. This essay is not meant as a
lecture. My intention is to make a hidden problem more visible – in Finland and all
the other Nordic countries, spanking is illegal, but it still exists. These spankings may
have consequences for children’s sexual identity development, and it is important to
point out the dangerous mixture of force, power, violence and love that is at work.
Creating clear limits for this essay has proven to be a difficult task. The previous
research in this topic is vast, although very few of these works have actually reached
Finland. It is easy to get lost in the jungle of research branches. The consequences of
child abuse is a topic widely written about, and the main limitations I have been
forced to make here. One cannot write about all these consequences in a single essay.
Therefore, I have concentrated my research on the consequences that have to do with
the child’s sexual and psychosocial development, such parts of life that have to do
with sexuality, trust and partnership, relations and vulnerability. I will mention
sadomasochism but will not cover it further. Nor will I discuss forms of child abuse
other than spanking, i.e., slapping or otherwise striking the child’s buttocks.

Chapter 2 will deal with some of the definitions that are important to this essay. I
am going to discuss my choice of terms and the difficulty of translating these from
the English language and the different linguistic meanings of these terms.

Chapter 3 is an analysis of sexualized spanking as a concept and how this can be
seen as abuse. I will also discuss the sexuality of the child.

Chapter 4 is a resumé of the most important research findings on this subject, along
with a presentation of the two main viewpoints with respect spanking children, i.e.,
that of people who are in favour of corporal punishment versus that of people
opposed to this form of discipline.

In chapter 5, I will be dealing with some of the most fundamental psychosexual and
psychosocial consequences of sexualized spanking and how these affect the child’s
development. Chapter 6 ends the essay with a concluding discussion.

Still, this definition fails to capture the whole meaning of corporal punishment.
Murray A. Straus, an American child abuse researcher and child welfare activist, uses
the following definition of what corporal punishment is3

:
Corporal punishment is the use of physical force with the intention of causing a child to
experience pain, but not injury, for the purpose of correction or control of the child’s behaviour.
This definition is also supported by Mercurio (1975).

We have here not only a difference in language use, but even a difference in the
perception of what abuse and physical violence really is. In the countries where
physical punishment of children is forbidden by law, the common notion is that all
forms of corporal punishment is abuse and therefore illegal. One cannot use methods
that would fall under the English word "spanking," since spanking is also abuse, and
therefore illegal. In other countries, such as Great Britain, France and the United
States, spanking is still allowed, and school spanking is common in about half of the
American states. All of this information can be read at Project NoSpank’s website. In
these countries, it is permissible to spank children--but not to abuse them. Therefore,
the phrase but not injury is added to Straus’ definition. One wants to separate these
two concepts by claiming that spanking cannot cause permanent injuries, and if such
injuries would appear, they have not deliberately been inflicted on the child. The 20
”spank-free” years we have had in the Nordic countries have changed our way of
looking at these things, and already now it is hard to understand the past ways of
thinking, but such thinking is the starting-point when dealing with issues of child
abuse in countries which have not yet abolished spanking. In these countries, it is
possible to hear this question: "Is spanking physical violence?"4

Since Swedish language doesn’t have a term equal to the English spanking, I have
chosen to use the Swedish word stjärt-aga. The word stjärt means bottom. With this I
mean corporal punishment inflicted on the child’s buttocks with the purpose of
punishing or correcting the child’s behaviour5.

2.2 Sexualized Violence
While the physical violence towards children seems to be on the decrease in Finland,
reports of an increasing sexual violence towards children are being published.6 Abuse
in the form of sexual violence could be anything from glances and comments to
caresses and rape. Defining the sexual violence described in this essay is more
difficult. Some authors, as for example Jeff Charles (2001), aver that the very act of
smacking children on their bottoms with the intention of causing the child pain is per
se a sexual assault, since the assaulted parts of the child’s body are erogenous zones
(more about this later).

That bottom-smacking can have sexual implications and overtones is for most
people not news. The fact that a simple Internet search for the term "spanking: yields
a mixed result of pornographic and factual web pages says a lot. Some of the sources
that I have used in this essay had to be ordered from publishing companies that also
publish so-called flagellant literature. The fact that spanking traditions have evolved
over extended periods of time confers distinct features on contemporary sexualized
punishment scenarios.7 Thus, sexualized violence here means corporal punishment
with sexual overtones.

3.1 The Child’s Sexuality
Shere Hite begins her Report on the Family with a question: ”Why do we deny the
sexuality of the child?” Naturally, there is no easy answer to this question. One can
imagine our own views of sexuality as something ugly and dirty being one reason
why we do not want to accept the idea that our children would nourish such
sentiments and desires – the thought of children as innocent and pure creatures is
appealing to us11. The fact that Developmental Psychology has made a clean break with
Freud and his psychoanalysis is also considered to be an important reason why we
tend to view our children as asexual. Freud was not, however, the first to describe the
urges of the child in sexual terms (more about this in Chapter 5).

Michel Foucault12 describes how people were forced to change their way of thinking
when the French authorities at the end of the 1970s started to consider legislation
against sexual abuse of children.

What is emerging is a new penal system [...] whose function is not so much to punish offenses
against these general laws concerning decency, as to protect populations and parts of populations
regarded as particularly vulnerable [...] there are people for whom others’ sexuality may become a
permanent danger. In this category, of course, are children.

Further in the same text, Foucault points to the fact that the sexuality of the child is of
another kind than the adult's, with its own phases and grades of maturity, and that the
sexuality of the adult may by no means enter the world of the child’s. This was a new
notion in the 1970s, and from this we can conclude that the corporal punishments in
school and in homes for centuries did not take the child’s sexual integrity into
consideration.

Hite devotes a whole chapter to punishments and sexuality. She claims that
spanking deforms the child’s sexuality and eroticism. Oddly enough, she does not
consider boys to the same extent as she considers girls, although Money (1986) and
Straus (1994) clearly point out that boys are in a greater risk of developing a
masochistic personality than are girls. Girls develop faster than boys. A girl can reach
orgasm already at ages four or five, while boys start to orgasm (without ejaculation)
at the age of seven at most. Striking a child on the buttocks in this sensitive age
means that the parent actually seizes power over the child’s body and by force gives a
message that mixes power, violence and sexuality13. John Money14 tells of a letter that he
received after a lecture he gave in India:

During my schoolhood in a Christian missionary Anglo-Indian Institute in Calcutta we were (all
boys) often caned on our upturned, upraised buttocks by the headmaster (with his attractive wife
sometimes looking on and passing humilitating, sarcastic comments). Needless to say, this
brutalized our love-maps and in certain cases brought about orgasms and a sickening addiction to
the rod and a good whipping.

This example clearly shows how the child’s buttocks function as an erogenous zone.15
Children also talk about how they fantasize about spanking and use these fantasies as
stimulants during masturbation. Freud was the first to (almost) create a conscious
connection between children’s beating-fantasies and real, self-lived experiences
during childhood.16

The child’s sexuality doesn’t pop up out of nowhere in the beginning of puberty but
rather is there from the beginning and develops slowly from birth17.

3.2 The Ritualized Punishment
What does this violence look like? Spanking (or beating, if you like) looks a little bit
different in the three previous mentioned countries were corporal punishment of
children is especially popular. In the USA, both girls and boys are commonly struck
on their buttocks with a paddle, an implement that looks like a wooden cutting-board
or a cricket bat. The verb used for this type of punishment is paddling. In Great
Britain, children are being beaten with the cane, but also sometimes with a leather
strap called a tawse18. The cane is often applied to the buttocks, but also sometimes on
the palm of the hand. (The same goes for the strap.) One must remember that school
violence is currently abolished in Great Britain as well, but this does not mean that it
does not exist. In addition, spanking is still very common in homes, and it is not
uncommon of parents to use the cane, especially on their sons19.

Another, equally important difference between the USA and Great Britain, is the
fact that girls are not being punished by male teachers in Great Britain. In U.S.
schools, on the other hand, girls as a rule are being forced to receive corporal
punishment from males. This increases the risk of actual injury, as the man who beats
her often is much bigger and stronger. Now, what drives these men?

As early as the 16th century, the Marquis de Sade wrote about teachers opening
schools so that they could satisfy their sexual urges by beating children as they
pleased. Gibson and other researchers state that these adults often are driven by
sexual desires, consciously or unconsciously. One must also remember that the
violence can be sexualized in the mind of the child quite independently of what drives
the adult who spanks. Violence against a child’s buttocks is therefore dubious from
different point of views.

Punishments of this kind can often be arbitrary. The ”crime” committed by the child
can sometimes be purely fictional, invented by the adult, or a crime only if committed
by a girl20. It is also hard, especially in the US, for a girl to choose another punishment
than the spanking. Boys are often given alternatives, such as cleaning or detention,
while the girls are being made to choose between a week’s suspension from school
and a spanking, all to make sure that the girl actually chooses the spanking21. Below a
quote from Charles:

[...] Females, unlike males, were not offered the alternative punishment of raking leaves since
raking leaves was ”unladylike”. Having 17-year-old women spread their legs and bend over his
desk while he stood behind each girl and brutally beat each girl’s sex area with six hard hits of a
two-foot long board was, however, sufficiently ”ladylike” for Mr. Varney’s sensibilities22.

Charles describes here how the young girls have to spread their legs and bend over
the principal’s desk. The sexual implications are so clear that it feels unnecessary to
mention them: a girl in this position is imitating sexual willingness and invitation to
intercourse. That the punishing men in this case are seeking sexual satisfaction is
being reforced by the projection of the personal desire by the phrase ”I am doing this
for your own good23.” To punish a child in front of an audience (before the class or
before other adults), to force the child to undress completely or the lower body, to put
a child over the knee so that the genitals are pushing against the body of the adult, are
all elements that are there to add further humiliation and shame to the corporal
punishment:

She [the teacher] once left our classroom for a few minutes, so I went to the front and started
imitating her – and she came back and caught me, put me over her knee, pulled my knickers down,
and smacked me in front of the whole class. It was very humilitating24.

They make you spread your legs and bend over and put your hands flat on the desk. Then they rub
the paddle lightly on your rear end just to kind of tease you, and then they hit you as hard as they
can25.

Shame is also a big part of the punishments that are being given to children by
parents, at home. Charles tells of girls in their teen years who are being forced to
undress completely before their fathers. In some cases the children are forced to wear
diapers, to stand naked in a corner, or as Gibson describes it, are being humiliated and
disgraced by the command: ”Kiss the rod!”26 In this way, child-rearing manuals that
encourage parents to hit their children often serve as pornography for people who
become sexually excited by discipline (masochists and sadists). Often, these
punishment manuals bear forewords written by priests or other men of the church,
who are being perceived as authorities by the parents. Such urges used to be called
perversions, but are now being called paraphilias27.

By the force of a vicious habit gaining ground upon him, he practis’d a vice he disapprov’d. But it
grew more obstinate and rooted in his nature, from his using it from a child, when a reciprocal
frication among his school-fellows used to be provoked by the titulation of stripes. A strange
instance what a power the force of education has in grafting inveterate ill habits on our morals30.

The earliest described case of sexual sadism in connection with flagellation can be
found in a letter written by the doctor J. M. Nesterus. The letter was written in 1672
and Gibson quotes for us the most important part:

I have known intimately a very learned man, whose name I shall omit for honour’s sake, who,
whenever in school or elsewhere he sees a boy punished, unbreeched and beaten, and hears his
cries, at once ejaculates semen copiously without any tension or erection of the penis but with
such mental confusion that he could almost swoon, and the same thing happens to him frequently
in sleep when he dreams of this subject31.

In the turn of the 17th and 18th century, people started to more often question the so-called
lower discipline, pointing out that it was a particularly cruel and degrading
form of punishment and that it ruined the souls of young children. Instead people
spoke for so-called upper discipline, which meant lashes upon the shoulders and back
just as described in the Bible. Now the public started to seriously reflect upon the
sexual implications of the spanking and beating of schoolboys, which during those
times consisted of brutal blows of birch rods on the boy’s naked buttocks, often
resulting in bloody wounds. The large number of prostitutes providing these sorts of
services made people even more convinced. In some countries, such as France, the
authorities listened, but the English schoolteachers in particular wouldn’t listen, and
the beating of children in schools would continue into the 1990s32.

The Confessions of Jean-Jacques Rousseau were published in the year 1782, and his
first personal confession was this: as a schoolboy, he was beaten by a young woman
and came to associate sex with spanking from then on. Rousseau was the first to
”come out” as a sadomasochist, even if that particular term was not invented by that
time. He was even wise enough not to pass his "vice" on to the next generation – he
always condemned corporal punishment of children in strong words, and spanking
had no room in Èmile, his book about education of children.
Richard von Krafft-Ebing, contemporary of Sigmund Freud, would also become
one of Freud’s role models. Krafft-Ebing himself only followed the by-then classical
track originally created by Meibom, that of the body reacting by reflex to flagellation.
Freud took these notions and developed them further by recognizing the human
psyche and, above all, the unconscious.

4.2 Sigmund Freud
As I already mentioned in chapter 3, the theories of Freud regarding child sexuality
have been proved very important to the research within this particular topic. Freud’s
discovery of the unconscious and the supression mechanism created new horizons for
thought and the notion that it is possible to supress memories of unpleasant or
unbearable episodes, such as abuse in childhood. His theories on children’s beatingfantasies
that he published in 190533 give room for such an interpretion, although Freud
himself preferred to put the blame on the child by calling it the seductive child. He
was not ready to admit that these beating-fantasies really could be actual memories or
memories transformed, created in the early childhood by one or both of the parents34.
The thought ”I am being beaten by my father” is not literary to Freud, but a masked,
Oedipal wish expressed by the child35.

4.3 Research After Freud
Many of the researchers and scholars who have studied the connections between
corporal punishment and abberations in the psychosexual development of children,
mainly focus on the fact that spanked children run a risk of becoming sadomasochists.
Since main focus lies on this aspect, it is easy to be fooled into believing that this is
the one and only consequence of beating, but it is of course not so. The human
psychosexual reality consists of so much more than the actual sex life. In this chapter
I shall briefly present some of the most important research results of modern time. As
I already mentioned, these research results have been unambiguous: spanking of
childrens’ bottoms can be dangerous to the development of the child. But few have
chosen to listen. Oskar Pfister was a doctor and a psychoanalyst in the 1920s and says
this in his book Love in Children and its Abberations:

I have had constantly to do with neurotics in whom sadistic feelings were first aroused by corporal
punishment; after the sadistic impulse thus awakened has been repressed and forms the starting
points of very malignant abberations about which it would be very disingenuous to aver that they
would have developed without the free use of the rod ... The number of those who are harmed
through beating, especially upon the buttocks, is undoubtedly very great .... Even one who
passionately contemns sexuality will hardly be inclined to deny that corporal punishment induced
well-marked sexual stimulations – although the gluteal region is not within the domain of the
genital organs36.

Otto Fenichel later revised Pfister’s opinion that the buttocks are not an erogenous
zone. He talks about spanking of children’s bottoms leading to anal fixation that will
make the bottom ”trade places” with the genitals as being the number-one erogenous
zone37.

Murray A. Straus was already by the beginning of the 1970s trying to make the
American population aware of the dangers of the widespread abuse of children. Even
today some 94 per cent of American toddlers are being spanked on regular basis38.
Straus also pointed out early on the sexual aspects of child-spanking. He moreover
questions frequently the fact that child abuse researchers often choose to close their
eyes to the sexual aspects of bottom-spanking, even those who unprejudicedly do
research on incest and other sexual assaults on children39.

John Money, a professor in Medical Psychology and Pediatrics, introduced his
theory of Lovemaps in the 1980s. The term is meant to describe the routes which the
individual’s mind must take to achieve sexual pleasure and satisfaction40. The average
child has a heterosexual map that includes no bigger complications, but if the child’s
lovemap is being vandalized, the child will connect erotic pleasure to acts that for
most people do not have anything to do with sex. Especially if the child is being
punished by the adult for having played games of sexual curiosity, the child will
connect pain with sex.

4.4 Attitudes Towards Spanking – Opinions For and Against
There is not enough room in this essay for a detailed presentation of the now
prevailing attitudes towards corporal punishment. These attitudes can roughly be
divided into two different camps: the conservative, religious fundamentalist one and
the humanistic one. Child abuse and religious (Christian, Jewish, Islamic and Hindu)
extremism are often closely connected as these individuals choose to interpret their
religious texts in a very literal manner41. These children grow up in an environment
where they risk getting beaten for just about anything, especially for so-called
character flaws or moral errors such as lying. Attitudes and opinions like the one of
reverend Roloff from Texas42, are common: ”Better a pink bottom than a black soul.”
In these circumstances, Christian child-rearing manuals (by critics often called ”babywhipping
manuals”) play a major part. Authorities in the field are, for example, James
Dobson and the married couple Michael and Debi Pearl. The Pearls recommend
training children from birth quite in the same manner as one trains rats or circus
animals [sic!], so as to make the child absolutely obedient. They use twigs and
switches from trees to reinforce this training.

Straus dedicates a whole chapter in his book The Primordial Violence: Corporal
Punishment By Parents to confronting and refuting the most common defences of
spanking, and Biblical interpretation is an important factor in these defences. He
claims that the consequences of a strict father-image is an equally strict God-image.
When the child grows up, this God-image justifies continual abuse of his or her own
children43. In the mind of the child, he or she is naughty and only worth loving after the
punishment has been taken.

The fundamentalist (Judeo-Christian) approach is built on a couple of Bible quotes
from the Old Testament (see for example Proverbs 3:12; 13;24; 19:18 and 23:13-14).
These are without exeption quotes from Solomon, who is viewed as a particularly
wise man. He recommends striking sons on their backs with canes (rods) to create red
stripes. Often you can hear the words ”spare the rod, spoil the child” being quoted in
the strong belief that these words are from the Bible, but they are not. This phrase is
not Biblical, but from a satirical poem called Hudibras written by Samuel Butler in
1664. One lady wishes to flagellate her lover, Sir Hudibras, as says like this:

But since our sex’s modesty If matrimony and hanging too
Will not allow I should be by, By dest’ny, why not whipping too?
Bring me, on oath, a fair account, What medicine else can cure the fits
And honour too, when you have done it; Of lovers, when they lose their wits?
And I’ll admit you to the place Love is a boy, by poets styled,
You claim as due in good grace Then spare the rod and spoil the child44.

According to the poem, spanking is an erotic way of expressing love for one’s partner
– you spank because you love. Love and pain are thus connected, according to Butler,
and a description of pure masochism. Should one expose a child to such a confusing
message? Opponents of lower discipline have always pointed out that this form of
punishment is degrading and overwhelms the child with shame and humiliation.
”Nothing kills quicker than ridicule45.”

5.1 Spanking and Poor Self-Esteem
Shere Hite is one of those who have chosen to view the child in a larger perspective.
By interviewing both children and adults, she has devoted a whole chapter in her
Report on the Family to the dynamics in families who use physical violence. Hite
discovered early on that it was very hard for the interviewees to talk about how they
were beaten as children and about the emotions these memories awoke in them. They
often speak of themselves in degrading terms and thus show signs of poor self-esteem
and shame.

Why didn’t you experience anger? – Probably because one cannot afford to get angry under such
circumstances. After the punishment the child is expected to apologize, it is the child who is in the
wrong. The child may not show anger towards the parent, the child may not morally condemn the
parents. The child must only love and obey47.

The child is forbidden to act and react in a proper way in these situations. The child
cannot defend itself and often the child hears that the punishment will be harsher if
the child tries to strike back or refuses to lay still. The connection between pain, fear
and love starts early on – the pain and the fear comes from the adult’s actions, and the
love is there despite the abuse: the child loves the parent, and the parent often says
that it is because she or he loves the child that the child is being spanked48. Charles
speaks of bottom-spanking as damaging to the child’s self-image and its future safety:

When we hit the sex areas of children we violate their natural God-given sense of sexual modesty
and dignity. Thus, with their resistance to adults handling their sex areas and hurting them in the
process worn down by repeated ”spanking”, children are naturally more vulnerable to other
sexually sadistic adults who would prey on them.

The child gets mixed messages at this point. The child learns early on that one is not
supposed to show ”the private parts” to other people, and the adults tells the child not
to talk to strangers or to get into a stranger’s car, the better to protect them from
pedophiles and other predators. At the same time, the parents/teachers themselves
break this code of decency by pulling down the child's trousers and spanking him or
her49.

5.2 Flagellomania and Other Sadomasochistic Behaviour
Ian Gibson’s The English Vice clearly shows how a whole culture can be formed
around a phenomenon he chooses to call "flagellomania." With this term he refers to
the abnormal fixation on everything that has to do with corporal punishment, and
above all, the bottom as an erogenous zone and bottom-spanking. Human sexuality
can thus form around this fixation, and flagellation often becomes the one and only
thing that awakens sexual desire and leads to satisfaction50. Such behaviour is
commonly called sadomasochism. It is important to remember, however, that there is
a difference between so-called moral sadomasochism and erogenous sadomasochism.
Sadomasochism is nowadays no longer listed in DSM-IV51, which means that this
syndrome is no longer considered as a mental disease. However, research indicates
that some parts of the sadomasochistic behaviour cannot be considered healthy,
especially if indulgence in such behaviour52 is not by one's own free will. Money
(1987) points out that sadomasochism is one of the many known paraphilias, which
means sexual attraction towards objects (such as leather) or situations (such as
punishment rituals). Typical of paraphilias is that the lust partner is not the same as
the love partner:

It is more accurate to say that paraphilias are love disorders rather than sex disorders53.

It can therefore be said that a sadomasochistic personality may lead to huge problems
in the person’s loving relationships.

Moral sadomasochism, according to Fenichel, consists of an extreme submissive
behaviour, among both women and men. Freud also talked about such behaviour,
where individuals allowed themselves to be totally consumed by their partner in such
a way that they ceased to exist for their own sake and completely dissolved their own
personality54. Fenichel gives us an example of such behaviour:

The patient imagined she was the penis of her exalted father, and thus his favourite and most
important part [...] the fantasy of being a part of the partner’s body is the basis of ”extreme
submissiveness”55.

5.3 A Feeling of Having Been Raped
Hite, Stone, Gibson and Straus each give us accounts of both girls and boys who
describe their spankings as akin to being raped. Here we are dealing with children
who have experienced the bottom-spanking as a pure assault and continued to classify
it as such, without transforming the incident to an enjoyable (and thus less
threatening) experience in their imagination. This transformation process, according
to Fenichel and Money, is a sign of infantile sexuality. Thus, one may conclude that
these children show a more mature reaction, for which there may be many reasons.
The most common reason is that the boy or girl comes from a home where corporal
punishment has never been used as a method of discipline and the child has therefore
an intact sense of bodily integrity. If this child is forced to submit to corporal
punishment at school, for example, the reaction is often violent and the feeling of
having been raped is obvious. A girl tells her story at Jordan Riak’s Web site, Project
NoSpank, under the title "Rape: Lesson No. 1". I am going to quote here some
passages to illustrate this feeling of rape:

I had been late three times to school and sent to the referral center, where I had to explain myself
to a male administrative assistant. The teacher told me that I would be given a choice of three
”swats” or three days suspension [...] Picturing myself in that obscene position with a male
administrator and a witness leering at me was a very frightening thought. I became nauseated and
went to the school rest room, where I vomited [...] Before I knew it the words I dreaded were
being said: ”I want you to bend over and lie flat on the desk, feet wide apart”. So, reluctantly I
bent over the desk trying to maintain as much modesty as possible. I can still hear his next
command: ”feet wider apart”. [...] The bruises lasted three weeks, and I had to be careful not to let
anyone see them. I was terribly embarrassed and humiliated [...] I only know that this experience
was the closest thing to a rape as I can imagine.

One can conclude that American teachers have chosen to close their eyes to the fact
that bottom-spanking is experienced as a sexual assault by the child itself, and that
pro-spankers likewise close their eyes to their own intentions. It cannot be only a
question of punishing a child for errors made – that could be done in a much less
sexualized manner. Is it a repetition of their own experiences of abuse from the time
when they went to school? Is it religious conviction, the force of habit, or pedophilia?
There is no room in this essay for such an analysis, but I intend to take a further look
at this topic in other assignments. If we are to believe Gibson, the driving force
behind assaults like these is mainly a sexual one.

Stone's categories give us a clearer view of the factual problem. Number 5 is
especially disturbing: countries such as Thailand have reintroduced corporal
punishment on their agenda, and certain states in the U.S. are discussing the same
thing. With this kept in mind, and with the knowledge that violence breeds violence,
we get a pretty grim picture of the future. Hard work is needed to change attitudes, for
as long as general society's attitudes toward corporal punishment and other forms of
child abuse are positive or of a laissez-faire type, legislation will not have a big
impact. The Nordic countries are perfect examples of how changes also in attitude
may lead to fewer cases of abuse57. Here, people have realized that the weakest
members of our society are equally worthy of effective protection against assault,
abuse and meaningless violence. At the same time, we must realize that things have
their own order. In many countries, social unjustice is still a widespread problem,
with women, the poor and minorities are systematically discriminated against daily.
In such countries, one can find people who believe poverty and racism to be bigger
problems that ought to be solved first, before focusing on the rights of the child. As a
child abuse researcher, I must protest against such a statement. I believe that the
neglect of our children ought to be remedied first, as these children inevitably grow
up with such neglect as their only frame of reference and are thereby prone to pass it
on to their own children. Peace on earth starts at home.